“Our sons need never be soldiers
Our daughters will never need guns
These are the years between
These are the years that were hard fought and won
…
Our shoreline was never invaded
Our country was never in flames
This is the calm we breathe…”
Midnight Oil, Forgotten Years
My country has just been invaded. For the second time ever.
Yes, it happened in Bali, but there are few places on Earth more Australian than a night club in Kuta Beach. It is the archetypal Australian vacation spot. It would be the equivalent of attacking Ibiza, if only the British went there.
My country has just been invaded. Attacked. Wounded.
Strange to talk about a nation being wounded. Yesterday, I would have scoffed at nation meaning anything, just a socio-linguistic concept for a mish-mash of cultures who all ended up on the same landmass. Now, I want to paint my body with my country’s colours and raise the flag above my house. I understand everything I saw the people of America do, and everything I heard my American net colleagues say. I thought I had some idea before, but I was wrong. God, I was wrong.
It’s funny, the parallels, really. US soil has only been attacked twice – Pearl Harbour and 9-11. Australia had its Pearl Harbour when the Japanese bombed Darwin, the only time Australia has been attacked by another country. It was about that time we turned to the US to watch over us. In what should come as no surprise, our role of being America’s sidekick has hurt us yet again. Only three-hundred-something men died in the Vietnam war. The estimated Australian dead in Bali is already over a hundred and twenty.
I was bought up post-Vietnam, after the seventies, when anti-war sentiments were so ingrained they were almost nostalgic. The days when boys argued with their dads over Anzac Day were long gone – now we all just knew war was a Bad Thing. All the period dramas – from The Sullivans to Brides of Christ – certainly never let us forget that.
War has always terrified and fascinated me. Not so much the thing itself, but my relationship to it. Precious little has horrified me more than when I first learnt about the Lottery they used to get conscripts for Vietnam. Since that history lesson, I have never stopped wondering if my number had ever come up, and what would have happened had I been of age.
Most of all, I was terribly conscious of the fact that I was from a generation that knew nothing at all of war. One of my favourite songs in the world is Forgotten Years, by Midnight Oil. It’s a cry about the years between – and when we’re in them, we tend to forget the years where we fought for it to be like that. I also chose to interpret it as something of a glorious theme song for my generation, and the disassociation with the past I decided we couldn’t help but feel. How can you really know what it was like, enough to make choices about it now? How can you understand what it was like to live in those times, under those huge shadows of fear and grief?
I felt guilty for not knowing. Afraid of not being tested – or what might happen if I was. Lost without an anchor to the world, and weak without an arena where my choices would matter. And out of touch with those who did know, and could never tell me.
I have always been a firm pacifist – but the older I get, the more I question my motives for making that choice. Was it about standing for what I believe – or simple cowardice? For that matter, what the hell do I believe?
And now, nothing has changed. I still don’t know what I believe. I still can’t tell the angels from the devils. I’m still confused by endless disinformation and paralysed with impotence. What has happened is the tension has been pulled even tighter, the vice turned yet another notch closer to breaking point. My decisions and actions become more and more important, the choices I make a million times more personal and more cutting.
And I also know now not just what it is to be afraid of war coming, but to be afraid of war. I sat and saw the carnage unfold, watching my country being pulled into a very real, very deadly world war which has been going on for a year now, and I wept with fear and horror. I wept for the dead and the dead to come. I wept for the evils humans never cease to do, and of the great shadow of evil that seems so ready to engulf us. And I thought of the English people, watching that great shadow of war descend across Europe fifty three years ago, hearing on the wireless the news of each new invasion, each new atrocity until finally there is the event – when the Royal Oak was sunk, the first British casualties of WW2, or maybe when the Nazis marched through the Arc de Triomphe, or perhaps most likely, when the very first bombs of the Blitz fell – the event that tells you that you are now at war. Not you in the abstract, you in the personal. In the actual. In the now.
This is a different war on a different stage with a different timeclock, but it’s all the same – the baptism of fire has happened. The first bombs have fallen. The first bodies have been carried out. My countrymen are dead. I am at war. Mostly with myself.
And what is more – so much more – I am afraid. Not of loss. Not of death. Not even of choices. I am afraid of war. And I see it coming for us now, on wings as dark as night, and it terrifies me more than anything I have ever known.
Steve Darlington, Oxford, 14th of October, 2002.